Tech Today w/ Ken May

In the world of head-worn displays, Google Glass seems to lately get most of the praise as well as most of the dirty looks, though it’s far from alone. At this year’s DroidCon in London, I talked with Epson Europe product manager Marc-Antoine Godfroid about a very different kind of head-worn display: the Moverio BT-100. Epson’s display is running a Google operating system, but it isn’t competing with Glass, at least not directly. The hardware in this case is a relatively high-definition stereo display meant for immersion (whether that means information overlays or watching recorded video) hooked to an external control unit running Android, rather than the sparer, information-dashboard, all-in-one approach of Glass. One other big difference: Epson’s stereo, full-color headset is cheaper than Glass, and available now. Hit the link below to see what it looks like. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Freshly Exhumed sends this story from Reuters: “Scientists plumbing the Pacific Ocean off the Hawaii coast have discovered a Second World War era Japanese submarine, a technological marvel that had been preparing to attack the Panama Canal before being scuttled by U.S. forces. The 122-meter ‘Sen-Toku’ class vessel — among the largest pre-nuclear submarines ever built — was found in August off the southwest coast of Oahu and had been missing since 1946, scientists at the University of Hawaii at Manoa said. The I-400 and its sister ship, the I-401, which was found off Oahu in 2005, were able to travel one and a half times around the world without refueling and could hold up to three folding-wing bombers that could be launched minutes after resurfacing, the scientists said.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you fit into the piece of the Venn diagram between “Fans of The Hobbit, ” “Microsoft Users, ” and “Folks Who Have a 3D Printer, ” Microsoft and Warner Bros. UK have a treat: On December 13th, when the second Hobbit movie debuts, you’ll be able to download plans to 3D print your own souvenir: the Key to Erebor. Read more…        

We hold Google ransom for… one million Web requests. New Line Cinema Google Compute Engine, the company’s infrastructure-as-a-service cloud that competes against Amazon Web Services, is trying to take reliability and scale to the extreme. Yesterday, the company said it was able to serve “one million load balanced requests per second” with a single IP address receiving the traffic and distributing it across 200 Web servers. Each of the million requests was just “one byte in size not including the http headers,” Google Performance Engineering Manager Anthony F. Voellm wrote in a blog . It’s thus not representative of real-world traffic, but the simulation shows that Compute Engine should be able to let websites absorb big bursts in traffic without shutting down. According to Google, the test showed the load balancer was able to serve the aforementioned one million requests “within five seconds after the setup and without any pre-warming.” The test ran for more than seven minutes. “The 1M number is measuring a complete request and successful response,” Voellm wrote. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

cagraham writes “Startup Swarm Mobile intends to help physical retailers counter online shopping habits by collecting data on their customer’s actions. Swarm’s platform integrates with store’s Wifi networks in order to monitor what exactly customers are doing while shopping. In exchange for collecting analytics, shoppers get access to free internet. Swarm then send reports to the store owners, detailing how many customers checked prices online, or compared rival products on their phones. Their platform also allows stores to directly send discount codes or coupons to shopper’s phones.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Bad Astronomer writes “Planets orbiting other stars are usually found indirectly (by blocking their stars’ light or inducing a Doppler shift in the light as they orbit, for example), but direct images of exoplanets are extremely rare. However, using the 10-meter Keck telescope in Hawaii, astronomers have taken photographs of three nearby exoplanets, all young, massive, and hot. One may be massive enough to count as a brown dwarf, but the other two are more likely in the planet-mass range. All three are very far from their stars, which means they may have formed differently than the planets in our solar system.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Jeff Bezos went on 60 Minutes and mentioned that Amazon was experimenting with delivery drones , we knew it was only a matter of time before other companies revealed similar plans. And, one day later, sources at UPS have told The Verge that the delivery giant has its own unmanned flying couriers in the lab. Publicly, the company is largely keeping silent, saying only that “the commercial use of drones is an interesting technology and we’ll continue to evaluate it.” But Ryan Calo, a law professor specializing in drones, isn’t afraid to speculate about what the program might look like. While he doesn’t rule out Amazon’s ambitious vision of an octo-copter dropping a package at your doorstep, he believes the first versions will be much more limited in scope. For example, he foresees a company like UPS using the self-piloted vehicles to move packages from airports and major cities to more remote pickup points. It wouldn’t be quite as convenient as having a robot bring your family’s Christmas gifts to your home, but it would certainly speed up delivery while keeping the cost in check. It would hardly be a surprise if UPS beat other delivery firms and Amazon to the punch on this one, as it invests quite heavily in R&D. According to a spokesperson, “UPS invests more in technology than any other company in the delivery business, and we’re always planning for the future.” That’s hardly a surprise coming from the company that already offers 3D printing services at some of its retail locations. Filed under: Robots , Transportation Comments Source: The Verge

Put simply, there are too many Android phones out there. The only way to know which ones are worth your time is to follow tech news every day. For those that have other things to do, here’s what matters when buying a new device. Read more…        

By creating highly detailed connectome maps of nearly 1, 000 men, women, boys, and girls, neuroscientists have shown the dramatic extent to which male and female brains are “wired” differently — cognitive variations that may help to explain why men and women fare better at certain tasks. Read more…        

KitKat may be the new kid on the Android block, but it’s already faring quite well. Google’s latest OS dashboard reveals that 1.1 percent of active Android devices are running the new platform roughly a month after it became available. Not that its arrival is slowing down Jelly Bean’s growth , mind you. The older software now represents 54.5 percent of all Android use, thanks in part to a two-point surge in devices running Android 4.3. However well Jelly Bean is doing, we expect KitKat adoption to rise quickly — both the Nexus 5 and the first official KitKat upgrades have only been around for a few weeks at most, and there are more updates on the way . Filed under: Cellphones , Tablets , Mobile , Google Comments Via: PhoneDog Source: Android Developers